deborahgoschyUX

Emoji Design

What does a hopeful expression look like? That was one question I had to ask myself when I was tasked with designing emojis for a class.

This is my hopeful emoji, the first emoji I designed and my favorite.

The other questions concerned choosing what kind of object could make an emoji...an apple, a cherry, an ice cream cone?...and how to accurately convey 34 other emotions.

After a lot of thinking and sketching, I decided that my emojis would be flames.

My Process

My preliminary process consisted of creating a moodboard of emoji images that other people had done, talking to my instructor and fellow designers, doing research on facial expressions (my Master's degree in Counseling came in handy there), and also lots and lots of sketching.

Communicating emotions accurately involves much more than manipulating a mouth into a smile; expressions involve the shapes of the eyes and mouth, the curves and position of the eyebrows, and the flushing or pallor of the skin. In addition to these factors, there are also cultural color meanings to consider: red is traditionally associated with anger, green is linked with jealousy, blue represents sadness, and so on.

When considering the design of my emojis I knew I wanted to do something different from the yellow circles we tend to see. I chose flames as they do not depict either gender or race, meaning they easily lend themselves to an inclusive design.

Sketches